Friday, January 16, 2015

American Horror Story, Season 4, Episode 12: Show Stoppers

It’s Elsa’s going away party/dinner and inaugurating
Chester as the new owner which is still going ahead. This includes Marjorie the
doll saying nasty things to Elsa, and Elsa celebrating Stanley. This is going
to be commemorated by movie night – a film where someone tries to con the
performers of a Freak Show and faces their comeuppance. Stanley isn’t thrilled
to watch it but Maggie insists he stays. Stanley senses a change in the air as
a big package is brought into the room.

Inside is the preserved head of the Morbidity Museum
director (murdered by Desiree after Maggie fainted). He tries to protest his
innocence but Maggie has already exposed him. They stab him in the leg and
chase him out into the stormy night – all carrying knives.

Onwards – Jimmy is being hidden by the show while he
makes his recovery, though he’s sad about Dell’s death; Elsa accurately counters
his attempts to romanticise the man’s memory. Jimmy is still pouty and angry
and calls Maggie a “slut”; Elsa is not impressed by his desperate attempts to
deny Dell’s killing of Ma Petite. She also defends Maggie for coming clean and
saving them. She both calls him out and comforts him over the loss of his hands
– and commands him to let Maggie help him.

Maggie treats his wounds which is agonisingly painful.
She still professes love and being with him forever, he points out she’s kind
of partly responsible for having his hands cut off. This has not endeared her
to him – and her apologies and insistence she will make things right will
neither resurrect Ma Petite or get his hands back.

Elsa gets a visit from the man who made her legs – and they
embrace happily. She takes him, Massimo, to see Jimmy and convinces Jimmy of
his skill by showing him her wooden legs. She also professes her love for
Massimo and recounts the rest of his story. After Massimo taught Elsa to walk
again, they were ready to flee Germany as the Nazis rose to power – but Massimo
insisted on staying and hunting down the men who cut off Elsa’s legs. But the
leader, Dr. Hans Grouper, got the better of him – he captured Massimo and
tortured him over and over again. Massimo didn’t get to America until 1947 when
he sought out Elsa. But Massimo claims the torture destroyed his soul – he can
no longer love

Over to Bette and Dot having sex with Chester – under the
disturbing watchful gaze of Marjorie (and there is not a sexy enough guy in the
world to make that enjoyable). They ask him to put her away and he does – which
of course means she rants at him later. She calls him a murderer, he says she
did it and she points out she is actually a doll (what is the paradox of an
inanimate object telling you they’re an inanimate object?) We have a flashback
of him killing his wife and her lover; he collapses in tears and begs Marjorie
to stay – and she says the twins have to go.

The sisters are feeling all happy and gooey when they go
back to the bedroom – when Dandy drops in to tell them he is so sorry and wants
to be friends and how brutally murdering his mother has totally reformed him:
and he gives them his dossier on Chester.

The performers get together to discuss what will happen
now, whether Elsa will stay with her Hollywood dream down in flames and ultimately
coming back to Paul reminding them all that Elsa is dangerous. Whatever
happened to Stanley, he talked before hand – telling them enough for Suzi to
think Elsa killed Ethel. Paul reminds them of the same code that Elsa invoked –people
who come after them get killed.

The next day, Chester runs through the line up for the
show but Bette is now very disturbed by Dandy’s revelations even as Dot insists
they can’t trust Dandy. Which is a shame for Chester because he wants to cut
them in half and he wants to practice right now – the Twins up and leave
because HELL NO.

Maggie, desperate for redemption, volunteers instead – and Chester hallucinates
her as Lucy (his dead wife’s lover) who taunts him. Not wanting to be left out,
Marjorie taunts him as well. Chester’s ranting is a little disturbing for the
troupe but they don’t stop him from cutting Maggie in half

For real. It’s messy. And he’s not nearly a good enough
magician to put her together again.

Chester has a meltdown and leaves the stage, leaving the
rest of the performers with the aftermath. Desiree is practical though – she declares
Maggie had it coming so they’ll steal her jewellery and bury her. While Chester
goes back to his caravan and stabs Marjorie to death – I’m not even sure what
really happened.

Eve tells Jimmy that Maggie is dead, he just numbly
listens and doesn’t want to hear the details – she then tells him that Elsa is
next.

Bette and Dot hurry to warn Elsa, when Elsa tries to play
the mother card they counter that Ethel was the mother of the show, not her.
When Elsa tries to get gooey over them warning her, Dot says they’re now even.
When Desiree leads the performers to Elsa’s tent, it’s empty.

Elsa is met by Dandy who gives her money and documents.
Why? Because she sold the show – for $10,000, as the performers learn when
Dandy goes to the show the next day. Exploring the show he finds the mutilated
remains of Stanley – his hands cut off and he now looks like Meep

And Chester goes to the police to confess to murdering
Marjorie

Aaaand Massimo still makes Jimmy new hands – that look
exactly like his old hands.

Ok we’ve got a lot to unpack here.

Elsa’s call out of Jimmy and Maggie’s ultimate fate is
interesting and actually kind of nuanced in some ways. Jimmy’s grief over Dell
was completely divorced from reality, grief for an idea and definitely out of
touch with who Dell was. It created a relationship between Dell and Jimmy that
just wasn’t there and, further, to mope after poor poor Dell while condemning
Maggie is the height of hypocrisy. Yet at the same time, Jimmy is right that
her apology is sorely lacking, not can I be surprised by Desiree’s cold
condemnation of her; Maggie is not blameless in Stanley’s crimes.

I can’t say I overly like her character. There was an
attempt to bring conflict to her character and certainly a level of redemption
(I think, by the end, we were supposed to be shocked and sad at least a little
that she was dead – unlike Dell and Stanley for example). But her character was
largely defined by men in her life: Stanley and Jimmy and her own traits (the
cunning that makes her a fortune reader, her past) are all downplayed next to
that.

There has also been a huge amount of female victimhood on
this show – can we even count the dead women? Ethel, Maggie, Regina, Nora,
Gloria, the Tupperware women, Ma Petite, Alice, Lucy, even Marjorie; to say
nothing of the victimisation of Penny, Elsa’s brutal back story and Bette and
Dot being a target, tool or asset for just about everyone. Of course, not all
of these characters are one note (and Jessica Lang reminds us what an actor she
is during her scene with Massimo) and Ethel was pretty awesome and Bette and
Dot have had some real season growth but the victimhood is wall to wall

On a related note – while I am happy to see Desiree be
something other than overly sexualised, I am not a fan of her being the raging
avatar of vengeance. She did that in Coven – ALL of Coven.

With Dell dead last week and Stanley dead this week, my
predictions are correct. This season had several gay men, 1 bisexual woman and
1 lesbian and it has brutally murdered (or tortured to the point of death)
every last one of them. 100% death rate (oh wait, Stanley’s un-named hustler
manages to escape the universal death). Not only have they all died, but they’ve
all either being completely non-character tokens (Andy, Alice, Lucy) or so
irredeemably evil that we’re meant to celebrate their deaths without any real
complexity or nuance to them.

Desiree remains as an intersex character who needs to
head for the hills.

Storywise we’ve just lost it. Chester was brought in to
play another round of mentally
ill = serial killer with Dandy for two episodes then disappear? What is the
point? Did they just run out of ideas and decide they needed something to
stretch it for a few more episodes?

Next week is the last episode and there will be more to
gnaw on – the awful and some of the very little decent too